The Forest Cathedral Review (PC)

good
key review info
  • Game: The Forest Cathedral
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: Yes  
  • Reviewed on:
The Forest Cathedral key art

It’s Fish Friday, which is a sign that it’s time to get to Mr. Valve and then use it to make sure that I can collect at least one sample from fish in the area. Their mosquito-based diet makes them perfect candidates to evaluate the effects of chemicals and see how they might then interact with other organisms and whether humans should worry about their effects.

The problem is a lack of electricity. As a biologist, I cannot rely on my mechanical skills. But that’s alright because all I have to do to get past this obstacle is play a little platformer. A little figure appears on a unicolor monitor and I need to guide it past obstacles and some enemies. Once he reaches his target and slots a block into the corresponding hole, I will have the electricity I need to do fish work.

The Forest Cathedral is developed by Brian Wilson, with publishing duties handled by Whitethorn Games. I played on the PC via Steam but it can also be bought on the Xbox Series X and S. The title is a narrative adventure, inspired by real events, with some surprising gameplay choices.

Players will become Rachel Carson, who is a real-world figure. She was a marine biologist that was deeply involved with the idea of conservation. After working for the United States Bureau of Fisheries, she became a writer. In 1962, she wrote Silent Spring, which is credited with developing the movement that led to the ban on the use of DDT and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Forest Cathedral
The Forest Cathedral
The Forest Cathedral
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The video game offers an alternate version of Rachel Carson, taking her to an island where the effects of DDT are tested on mosquitoes. She interacts with Doctor Mueller, a fictionalized version of the actual scientist who discovered that the substance was able to eliminate mosquitoes. There’s another narrative thread about self-doubt, explored via a series of conversations with herself and another biologist friend, named Dorothy, about her work.

The game starts with a simple task: spray five colonies of mosquitoes with DDT. It doesn’t evolve much from there. Paths through the island are linear, the number of objects to interact with is small, and there is no sense that the game can do anything else than tell a story.

The main gameplay element is not exploration or some sort of scientific work but a video game. Even though the tech for it would not exist at the time, Dr. Carson interacts with a wide swath of the physical world by playing a primitive version of an action platformer, featuring a character called Little Man.

He can jump, dash, wall-jump, and kill enemies, and his adventures in the game help to activate electricity and get a fish out of a stream. Spikes, disappearing blocks, animal enemies, and a variety of jumping puzzles stand in his way. Thankfully, it also features a lot of save points to reduce the pain of failure.

The platformer does not make any sense inside the world of the game and feels like a forced way to add some more gameplay to a pretty short experience. The good news is that there are options to make these sequences very easy in the Options and I think after the first two or three, everyone playing The Forest Cathedral should activate them.

The title does suggest at times that everything that’s happening is either taking place inside Dr. Carson’s mind or should be taken as a metaphor. I was intrigued enough by the weirdness of the experience to take a look at the real person on which the narrative is based and see whether she was ever stranded on an island or had to play very early video games.

To work as a video game, The Forest Cathedral should be either more realistic or much more abstract. Make the player do field world, ask him to track changes in certain populations, and get him to learn some actual scientific facts about DDT. Or drop all of that and turn everything into a more active experience, showing how hard it can be for scientists to show the public the truth via more complex platforming and combat.

As it stands, the game is a good jumping-off point for players who want to know more about DDT and environmental protection. But its mix of narrative and gameplay does not work.

The Forest Cathedral’s presentation is a mix of good and bad. The graphics are ambitious and there are moments when the developer offers great natural vistas with solid use of light and plenty of fauna. But the game struggles when it comes to its characters, who look profoundly unnatural, and the cutscenes also have a plastic feel, eliminating much of the immersion element. The scanner the main character uses also feels like it comes from an entirely different title.

The sound design is better. Most voice actors do a good job with the relatively limited material they have to work with but some sound pretty wooden. Rachel Carson herself is an example of putting emotion and feeling into even the more mundane lines. The natural world mostly sounds good, although the buzzing of mosquitoes might be a little too loud for comfort.

The Forest Cathedral
The Forest Cathedral
The Forest Cathedral
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The Good

  • Important DDT narrative
  • Draws attention to real-world Dr. Carson
  • Moments of beauty

The Bad

  • Limited gameplay
  • Little Man sequences
  • Short experience

Conclusion

The Forest Cathedral is an interesting experience but does not fully work as a video game. The narrative it is telling is based on a real-world person but introduces many elements that are anachronistic to the period and to her life. Maybe the main character should have been named something else and her story should have only hinted at the real-world scandal surrounding DDT and other pesticides.

The Little Man sections don’t add much to the overall experience but offer more straight-up gameplay than the island itself. The highest achievement of The Forest Cathedral is that it draws attention to Rachel Carson and to Silent Spring. It might not get many gamers to actually read the book but it does spell out the effects of DDT and emphasizes the importance of protecting the environment and finding ways to reduce the use of pesticides and other such chemical agents.

A review key was provided by the publisher

story 8
gameplay 6
concept 7
graphics 8
audio 7
multiplayer 0
final rating 7
Editor's review
good
 
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The Forest Cathedral Screenshots (21 Images)

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